Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Manliness

The 43rd President has told friends the ex-Alaska governor isn't qualified to be President and criticizes Arizona Sen. John McCain for putting Palin on the 2008 GOP ticket and handing her a national platform.

"Naming Palin makes Bush think less of McCain as a man," a Republican official familiar with Bush's thinking told the Daily News.

"He thinks McCain ran a lousy campaign with an unqualified running mate and destroyed any chance of winning by picking Palin."

McCain was tortured until he broke and collaborated with the enemy. From Bush, the younger man, who avoided active duty yet pranced around in a flight suit like a hero, that's a deeply cutting insult. McCain is reminded of his past every time he wakes up in pain. Bush whitewashes his past and gets off scot-free, his critics silenced by dirty tricks.

The right is trying to rehabilitate Bush and therefore themselves. (Which will probably work; you can't be an Exceptional American if you acknowledge that Americans keep screwing up.) McCain was forced to humble himself before Bush but times change, and it'll be very amusing interesting to see if and how McCain responds.

Wow. Just Wow. On the whole question of who gets to question who on manliness this is like some kind of bizarro house of mirrors. I may despise John McCain but his manliness quotient,-- insofar as manliness is associated with martial virtues like being an asshole, being able to endure pain, being touchy about honor, having a short fuse, being a gambler, a womanizer, and a risk taker-- is unquestioned.

Bush's manliness quotient by any standards other than photographic is entirely fictious and he has to know it.

Plus, what's with interjecting penis size into the "selected a crappy running mate" issue? Bush famously didn't even select his own running mate: that was done for him by Cheney who proceeded to run him like a pet dog for six years. How manly was that?

aimai (as usual) nails it, but one might add that Bush's every action and utterance is transparently in response to his fundamental insecurity "as a man." His entire presidency--his entire career--has been one of acting out. It would be amusingly pathetic if it hadn't entailed such widespread death, destruction, and suffering for so many others.

It's such a strange, needlessly insulting thing to say. The only motive I can think of is that it's part of the tea party/establishment schism, which, if true, means that the gap is larger than we thought, and very much tied in with everyone's ego.

So many weakness, so little time--with all the issues these people have, one could instigate massive amounts of in-fighting, if one just happened to enjoy that sort of thing. Which I do.

Aimai, that comment you made at Roy's about liberals not fighting made me wonder--how true is this? I don't mind fighting and I can't be the only one. Is the Democratic establishment afraid that a liberal won't stick to criticizing the other side and start criticizing his own side?

"George W Bush today reveals that his mother had a miscarriage when he was a teenager and showed him the foetus in a jar.In a remarkably candid interview to be broadcast tonight, the former President said Barbara Bush asked doctors to save the dead baby so she could show it to her son.

On a subsequent hospital visit she calmly motioned to the jar and toldhim: ‘Here’s the foetus’."

You guys probably know that his little sister died when Bush was very young and his parents went golfing the day after the funeral.

"The astonishing episode left a huge impact on the young Mr Bush and hardened his pro-life stance, causing him to lean further to the right on issue of abortion and stem cell therapy.‘There's no question that affected me, a philosophy that we shouldrespect life,’ he said."

Actually, it would do the opposite. It shows an utter lack of normal emotional expression. And of course I immediately think of Santorum and his own dead baby Show And Tell.

We will never be able to get these people to feel normal emotions. The only way to stop them from killing is to----wait, there is no way. They've ennured themselves to grief. They see stoicism--in fact, the absence of emotion--in the face of death as a good thing.

The standards of TD are mediocre Oscar because they always have been mediocre. That's the way the system works. This is a one party state and mediocrity rules here, just as it does in China. Smart and wealthy people don't seek money and power through seeking election themselves. Why on earth would they, and subject themselves to all the scrutiny (well, OK, there isn't really much of that) and hassle and abuse (nor much of that, but really smart and wealthy people don't think 300K of a salary is worth getting out of bed for to begin with) when all they have to do is buy an FF or FG TD to do their dirty work? And mediocrity can only survive by selling its votes, and buying off the Sheeple with pane et cirquem as ever. Vide Bertie Ahern. The Salieri of Irish politics. Yet he'd be returned to power in the morning by a majority still. Though he's wrecked the country Paudeen and Biddy care only for the euro in their phoca agus an siure insan tae. We learn nothing. We forget nothing.

Susan, in re the comment at Roy's, I don't know which one you mean because I'm suffering from bloggorhrea and don't keep track of my own posts. If you link to it here I'll try to give it a rousing defense.

In re "forget nothing and..." I think that's a line about the Bourbons though I can't trace the original speaker. As I understood it it refers to people who hang on to their grievances or their social status but forget their actual history or their current reality. That might be an indiosyncratic reading of the statement but it rings incredibly true, for me, about White Racism in the US and the teabagger mentality which seems to be all about grudge holding by people who suffer from some kind of massive political amnesia. Like someone with political angosonia (the inability to grasp what is happening to one's own body) while retaining a strong dislike of, say, chocolate. The first (historical amnesia, the disconnected body) is really, really, serious but the second, the grudge, the taste preference, is a total waste of time and energy.